Proponents of chaos theory love the story of the butterfly in Kansas. The butterfly flaps its wing, and a bird misses its prey. The bird banks, and in banking cools a column of hot, rising air. That decreases the pressure ever so slightly at higher elevation, which causes a slight change in the direction of a breeze. That breeze joins with a northerly gust along the coast, rather than merging with a sea-going breeze. That sea-going breeze then isn’t powerful enough to prevent the formation of a wind vortex in the Gulf Coast, and so a hurricane is born.

Does the butterfly “cause” the hurricane? No way in hell. A hurricane is enormously powerful, and the energy it contains must be dissipated somehow. All the butterfly does, in combination with a huge number of other actors, is influence the place and time of its occurrence.

Our lives are much like…